by Thelma P. Freedman

In 1994 and 1995, Dr. Rabia Clark queried 136 experienced past-life therapists about their uses of past-life therapy, and she found that troubled relationships were the most common problem.

In past-life therapy, people often discover that a good or a bad relationship has its roots in a past life, and sometimes in more than one past life. Sometimes I ask the client during the regression if the person in the past life was really the same person, the same soul, or if there was just something about him or her that is similar to the person in the present relationship. The answers I get split about half and half between these two possibilities. Sometimes a client says that yes, it really is the same person; sometimes, it is something familiar about the present-life person that reminds him or her of the past-life person.

The word “soul mate” is used a great deal today. It is often taken to mean someone with whom we have shared at least one or more past lives, with the assumption that those past-life relationships were happy ones. The experience of meeting such a person from our past lives can be a powerful and positive one. Sometimes we meet someone we just seem to “know” immediately, at first meeting sort of “click” seems to happen inside ourselves the moment we meet the person, and if we have met a soul mate; the click is a positive, happy experience.

But one can also meet someone we seem to “know” instinctively but who frightens us. We get a click experience then, too, but it is not a pleasant one. We immediately feel frightened of the person or have a strong dislike for him or her. Sometimes this is so strong that it is a physical reaction, a tensing in the stomach; a feeling of weakness or even an anxiety attack.

“Click” experiences, positive or negative, are rare, but they do happen, and they may well mean that we really have just met someone we have known in a past life, and maybe in more than one past life. If you meet someone and the click happens, the best advice is to pay attention to it, whether it is positive or negative. If it is negative, follow your intuition and run. That may be a perfectly nice person, but if you get a negative click, he or she is not for you.

But even when it is a positive, it does not always mean that you and this other person are destined to spend your lives together and be happy ever after. It may mean that, but it may not, too. You may have had one or more good past lives with the person, but this time you may both have other plans. Many people have such a click experience and initially believe they have found their soul mates, but in hypnosis they say they were just “checking in” with each other, like the very old friends they were. But both people have other goals for this lifetime. Perhaps we must actually avoid too many lives with the same person; that might make us too dependent upon each other.

A negative click feeling, one that frightens you or makes you instinctively dislike the other person, may indicate that although you have just met someone from one of your past lives, the past-life relationship was not a happy one, to put it mildly. The other person might have injured, betrayed, or even killed you, or harmed someone you loved in the past life. Or it could mean that you injured the other person and are still feeling guilty about it. You may even fear, unconsciously, that he or she is going to take revenge. You could be right, too. Forgiveness is not easy, and sometimes people do seem to be carrying an old grudge for a past-life injury, either physical or emotional. If they meet the person in the present life, revenge can become an unconscious obsession with them. People do seem to repeat many of the same relationship patterns over and over through several past lives.

And it doesn’t even have to be the same person. Ned, a man in his late thirties, had a history of “loving and leaving” women. Ned had started many relationships, but no sooner did the woman begin to be serious about him than Ned backed away, ending the relationship abruptly and cruelly, hurting her. In his regression, we found that in his most recent life, during World War II, he had been betrayed by a woman he loved; she had voluntarily told the Nazis his whereabouts and he and his small resistance group had been captured, tortured, and killed as a result. Now in this lifetime, Ned had still not forgiven her. Unconsciously, he was paying her back over and over, betraying her as she had betrayed him, although he was consciously unaware of it.

However, when we discovered all this in his regression, his Upper Mind also told us that he had not even met that same woman this time, at least not so far! But the women he was attracted to and then betrayed this time were all similar to that other woman in some little way: her eyes, or the color of her hair, or her voice. That was enough for Ned’s unconscious, focused on revenge as it was: This must be the same woman, she has the same eyes! So the ugly unconscious pattern repeated, over and over. In his regression, he had to forgive that other woman from that other lifetime, and he managed to do it once he saw the pattern.

In Ned’s case, neither he nor the women he had loved and left so hurtfully seemed to have had any click feelings when they met, either positive or negative. After all, they had not known each other in any of their past lives. If he had met the woman who had really betrayed him in the past life, he (and she as well) might have had a strong negative click feeling. And who can tell what might eventually have happened? Fortunately, Ned has finally forgiven her, and is trying to build better relationships now.

In other words, like Ned, we sometimes do carry our grudges from one life to another and we may unconsciously act on them, too, carrying out destructive patterns over and over that waste our own energy and hurt other people. The unconscious nature of such grudges may make them harder to get rid of, because consciously, we don’t even know we have them. Yet just like anything else we carry into this life from our past lives, such a grudge can influence our actions.

The kinds of relationships people say they have had over the years with other people show a lot of switching about of “roles.” For example, your mother in this life may have been your child in your last life and your good friend or your rival in still another lifetime. You and she may have changed genders from life to life; in fact, if you have lived very many lives together, you probably have. You may have actually chosen her as your mother this time because of good past-life connections. Or you may have chosen her because the two of you still have problems to work out, old scores to settle, perhaps. Or you may have had no past-life connections with her at all but with some other family member instead, or none with any of your family. But loving family relationships that come in from past lives can go rolling on over and over for generations, and they will be a source of strength and joy for the people involved.

If you have always had an especially strong feeling about some family member, and that feeling is returned, you may have known that family member in a past life and chosen to be reborn into his or her present family. Or you may be especially drawn to one particular child or grandchild, not exactly loving that child more than others, but a feeling that your relationship is different, special; that it has gone on for a long time. That child may have chosen to return to your family, to you. These inner knowings can make for loving and positive relationships between generations. If you have such a connection, it is rare and valuable, and should be treasured.

Sometimes a person has two positive click feelings about two different people. One woman, Angela, had married very young on the strength of her first positive click experience. She felt that she had met her soul mate, especially when she learned that her husband had had the same positive click experience when he met her. They were deeply in love when they married and they both expected to be happy, and at first they were. As time passed, however, Angela and her husband had a good many difficulties in the marriage, and over the years they grew farther and farther apart. Although they still loved each other, the passion had gone out of their relationship, and it was more of a “brother and sister love.”

Then when Angela was in her early thirties she met another man with whom she shared another strong positive click experience the moment they met. After great hesitation, they began an affair that had continued for two years when she came to see me. Angela felt increasingly guilty about betraying her husband and had come to the conclusion that she had to decide which of these two men she should be with. As she told me, she loved them both, and that was her problem.

In her regression, she discovered that she had known both of these men in two different past lives and had had good relationships with each of them. Angela and her present husband had had a close sister and brother relationship in a past life, but it had been marred by his insisting she stay at home so she could keep house for him, instead of marrying as she would have liked to do. As for Angela and her present lover, they had been married in another past life, and reasonably happily so. They were of reversed genders in that life, so that Angela had been the man and her present lover the woman.

But Angela’s Upper Mind also told her that the relationship with her present husband was over. It was no longer good for either of them, although it had been good at the beginning, while they both “grew up.” But now they both needed to break the old connection. They had become too dependent upon each other’s presence. Her lover, according to her Upper Mind, was the person she should be with now. It was a more mature relationship and would allow both of them to grow, and her Upper Mind hinted, rather mysteriously, they had some old issues to work out between them. Just what these issues were, Angela’s Upper Mind would not say.

In Angela’s case, her Upper Mind said she had actually lived two different past lives with these two men, one with her husband and one with her lover. Julie had a different situation. Julie had a son with whom she had always had a stormy relationship; even as a little boy he had challenged every direction she gave him. He seemed to think he should be the boss, not Julie, his mother. And Julie was aware that she herself encouraged his behavior. She was a little afraid of him and often just “let him get away with it.” He had been a cut-up in school and Julie had almost despaired of his future, but magically, so it seemed, when he reached his twenties and moved away from home, he suddenly became a responsible citizen, started his own successful business, married, and proceeded to build a stable family. But Julie’s tension with him remained and they were not friends.

In hypnosis, Julie went back to two past lives that were relevant to her relationship with her son. In one, he seemed to have been her father, and a very strict one; in the other, he seemed to have been her teacher, and he was at least as strict. And in those past lives, Julie had been terrified of both of those men. Yet when I asked her Upper Mind whether or not these two men were really her son, her Upper Mind said no. She had never known her son in any past life. It seemed that he was just naturally bossy! Perhaps he had become that way in his own past lives. But it was this very bossiness that had reminded Julie’s unconscious mind of those two men of whom she had been terrified in those two past lives, her father and her teacher in those lives. Her Upper Mind said that although the two of them were the same person, her son was not that person.

Furthermore, according to Julie’s Upper Mind, she had not even met that man in this lifetime. Julie was greatly relieved about this, and hoped she would never meet him. I reminded her that there is no such thing as “never” but that the odds were probably against it. Just the same, I also suggested that she should watch out for a negative click! In the meantime, Julie thought that perhaps she could work out a friendlier, more adult relationship with her son, now that he is grown and independent and the unconscious fear she felt toward him is gone.

Sometimes relationship problems are not with any specific person but rather with either men or women. This was true for Ned, whom I discussed above, and Maria had similar problems. Every time a relationship seemed to be “getting somewhere,” she would find some excuse to break it off. Unlike Ned, who unconsciously wanted to hurt women who reminded him of the woman who had betrayed him in his most recent past life, Maria broke off her relationships gently, trying to avoid hurting the man. Still, she broke them off and she knew that sometimes this was hurtful to them.

Maria went back to her two most recent past lives, in both of which she had been a very independent woman. In both lives, she had married “charming” men. But one of those charming men had died deeply in debt and left her almost penniless, with only the house left. She had to turn it into a boarding house to earn a skimpy living for herself and her two children. In the other past life, she had been a pioneer farm woman in the West, and her charming husband turned out to be an irresponsible ne’er-do-well. In the regression, she commented wryly that the only thing he did well was drink. The burden of running the farm and raising their family fell entirely on her shoulders.

In both of these past lives, Maria had learned to do what she must to survive and she had managed very well, becoming capable and independent. But in the process, she had become suspicious of men, especially “charming” men, and she had brought this lesson into her present life with her. Since Maria was also attracted to such men and knew it, she avoided any deep involvement with them, although she did like to go out and have a good time. But if the relationship threatened to become serious, she broke it off. Maria knew she could do just fine by herself, and she was suspicious of the very men she was attracted to!

When she saw this pattern, Maria decided that she might look a little more deeply into the real characteristics of the men she went out with. Perhaps the “charm” wasn’t always only skin-deep, after all. But perhaps she might also look around for men who were not so “charming.” As she herself saw after her regressions, there are more important things than charm to recommend a man.

Some men seem afraid of even beginning a relationship with a woman, keeping clear of any commitment at all. Sometimes this problem has its source in past lives. Jack, a man in his forties, had never been able to establish a good relationship with a woman; he could never commit and never let a relationship go that far. Jack recalled three past lives in which he had rejected a woman who loved him.

One took place in ancient Egypt, in a life in which he was a young priest who had taken vows never to leave the temple or to marry. He and a young woman had fallen in love and had been meeting secretly; they planned to run away together. But at the last minute, he felt so guilty about breaking his vows that he changed his mind and failed to meet her at the prearranged place. In other words, he stood her up. He never saw her again. In the second of the past lives that we examined, he had been a “righteous” Victorian Englishman whose beloved sister had become pregnant; after he found out, he had nothing but scorn for her. He refused to have anything more to do with her, and she had to raise her baby in poverty and disgrace, without family help. In the third life, he was a man living in the Sahara about five centuries ago whose marriage was arranged by his family. At first he had loved his wife, but over time he came to hate her and he eventually left her, leaving her with their young child and knowing she would face the ridicule of the rest of their community and have a very hard time raising their child.

These three past lives show a pattern: rejecting women who loved, trusted, and needed him. Jack had carried a lot of unconscious guilt over these rejections, and now in this lifetime he had tried to protect himself from more guilt by refusing to even start any relationships. Through these three past lives, Jack saw that he was afraid that if he let himself build a relationship with a woman, he would eventually break it off, hurting her in the process. He was even afraid to let himself fall in love, or even to take the chance that he might. In these past lives, love had led to his deserting women he loved or had once loved. Having seen the pattern, Jack felt that he had let himself be stopped from relationships too long, and that he would be able to build a good one.

Neither Maria’s nor Jack’s relationship problems were directly connected with anyone they knew now, in their present lives. Instead, their relationships in their past lives had been so traumatic that they had become afraid to build any relationships at all with the opposite sex.

However, one other thing about their cases may be important. In all the past lives that had caused their relationship problems, they were both the same gender as they are now: Maria was a woman, Jack, a man. But in other past lives, both had experienced good love and marriage relationships when they themselves were the opposite gender. In two other past lives, Maria had been a responsible married man with a reasonably happy family, and Jack recalled two lives as a married woman in which he had been happy and had not deserted anyone. It is as if their troubles were specific to the genders they are now. In Maria’s case, as a woman she could not trust “charming” men; in Jack’s case, as a man if he let a woman reach his heart, he would end up rejecting and deserting her. But in those lives in which they were of the opposite genders, they had no such problems. But both of them could use the knowledge of the good relationships they had established in those other past lives to build on their present lives.

Although both Maria and Jack were aware that their refusal to form relationships was a problem, neither felt any loneliness about this. They just felt that it was a problem, something to be solved. But many people do feel constant loneliness, and sometimes it has been caused by past-life experience, and often through no fault of their own.

Tony was a young man in his early twenties, and he felt himself to be alone wherever he was. And indeed, with no close friends and a dull job, his life was a daily routine that seemed to be going nowhere. Furthermore, girls seemed not even to notice him, and he had seldom dated. Tony struck me as very shy, too shy to assert himself enough to even get to know another person well, male or female. His attitude toward me was diffident: low voice and downcast eyes, as if apologizing for being there and taking up my time.

Tony recalled two past lives in which he had been excluded from the community life. In one, in an ancient Greek village, he had been orphaned when he was ten or so. He had made himself useful by doing odd jobs, and although he was able to get enough to eat, no one particularly cared about him. He slept in stables, and “People look right through me,” he said. He rarely spoke up about anything; if he did, no seemed to hear him. In the second past life, he was raised in an abusive family in Pennsylvania, and he ran away in his teens and joined a wagon train that was heading west during the gold rush of 1849. He went with a prospector into the hills and helped him work a claim, but one day the prospector left and never came back. The boy simply stayed there alone in the hut they had built, sifting for gold but not finding any, until one day he was killed by a roving band of men, probably claim jumpers.

During that life, Tony had learned not to trust other people: first, the people in his abusive family, and second, the other prospectors, many of whom were always ready to kill anyone they thought had actually found some gold. He had kept away from them as much as he could, but he was lonely in his hut after his prospector friend disappeared. And of course, in the end the other prospectors did kill him. In the Greek life, he was excluded from interactions with others except for the chores he did for them, and he knew there was no way he could improve things. He would always be lonely and alone. In both lives, he saw that others had friends and families, but he had none. And trying to relate to anyone in either life was dangerous. In the Greek life, he would be ignored or laughed at; in the other life, while he was with his family in Pennsylvania he learned to keep out of the way for fear of blows, and with the prospectors he didn’t dare approach them for fear of what they might do to him.

Finding the sources of his loneliness was a help to Tony. He realized that conditions were different now, in this life, and he could dare to be more open with others. In fact, from the way his demeanor with me changed after we had examined those two past lives, I could tell that he would indeed become friendlier and less shy, displaying healthier self-assertion. His previously low voice was stronger and more inflected; his eyes looked at me instead of down at his clenched hands. In fact, his hands themselves were relaxed now.

But we also talked about the fact that making friends is always a bit chancy, and this is especially true when it comes to going out with girls. One can sometimes get hurt, no doubt about it. I recommended that he go slowly, even start by simply making a friend at work before he started asking girls to lunch. I also warned him that he should expect to make a few mistakes at first, and he should be ready to forgive himself for those mistakes.

I gave Tony all these warnings because, in cases like his, although the fear of approaching others in a friendly manner might be gone, he had not developed the social skills necessary to do this effectively. In other situations, like the ones above, merely being free of the problem is usually enough to allow the person to get on with his or her life. But in cases like Tony’s, and especially when the person is young, some new social skills often need to be learned before the person can truly be free of the problem. It is best to warn people of this; that way, they won’t plunge in too fast and get hurt. It’s all very well to get rid of your fear of water, but don’t jump off the high dive until you learn to swim.

There is something else that needs to be said about relationships, and it is very important. As I have mentioned above, people seem to live lives in both genders. If we have a more or less even split between male and female lives, we seem to be able to adjust to whatever gender we find ourselves this time. We will learn in our childhoods what our present society expects members of our present gender to be like, and we will adjust ourselves to that model as well as we can.

Yet we seem to take our experiences of being the other gender into our present life as well. It can make women more assertive than our society has approved of women being; it can make men gentler and more nurturing than is usually expected of men. We in the West live today in societies that are much more forgiving than past societies have been when it comes to gender behavior. Our Western societies are complicated and pluralistic, and they offer many different models of “correct” gender behavior. But the old stereotyped models still linger, and they often stop people from expressing their true selves or reaching the goals they came in with.

Yet we are all individuals, each with our own goals, abilities, and aspirations, developed partly over our past lifetimes and partly from our experiences in this life, and we do best when we recognize that fact. It affects ourselves and our relationships. Relationships can get into trouble when people accept the old stereotypes about what males and females are “supposed” to be like. It is best to realize that some people like to tinker with engines, others like to cook; and they can be female or male either way.

I guess that’s the point. Men are not from warlike Mars, and women are not from loving Venus. We all have elements of each gender in our makeup, or we do if we have been lucky and lived a reasonable balance of female and male lives. A woman may much prefer to start and run a business and a man may just love cooking and prefer to stay home and do it. In fact, in our society, these role changes are becoming acceptable for more and more couples, because of the breakdown of the old stereotypes. But if people don’t realize this, if they keep on expecting the old behaviors from each other or from themselves, they are stifling each other as well as themselves and they will find themselves – and their relationships – unhappy and in trouble.

Another area that involves relationships and gender identifications is the area of homosexuality, both male and female. Unfortunately, this is an area that is in much need of research into the past lives involved. Here I can only speak from my own experience with clients. Of course, most gay and lesbian people do not come for past-life therapy for their gender identification; why should they? These days, they do not usually feel that this is a problem for them. They come for other reasons, the same problems as others, and I often do not even know they are gay or lesbian. The question may not even arise, and in any case I do not usually ask client’s Upper Minds the cause of their gender identification. But if there is a pattern, it may have to do with the numbers of lives of each gender the person has lived. Doris, a lesbian living in a good relationship, wanted to recall all of her past lives; Carol, a heterosexual woman, wanted the same.

Carol had lived nine male and five female lives, a fairly good balance, and had grown to adulthood in all but one, a male life. Doris, on the other hand, recalled thirteen female lives and only three as males, and those three were all very short. In those three male lives she had died at four, five, and fifteen, respectively. Doris recognized that she had not, so far, lived as an adult male and had no idea what life was like for them. She was actually afraid of men, and preferred the “safer” company of women, including her sexual relationships. She still does. As I said above, more research needs to be done about this issue.

An interesting question about gender issues is raised by transsexuals, who say, “I am in the wrong body.” From the standpoint of past lives, this is a fascinating statement, and it could well be true, but unfortunately, no one has done the necessary research yet to determine the truth. It could be that a person, after a long series of lives as one gender, feels strange and “wrong” to find him or her self suddenly born into the other. This seems reasonable, but as I say, the necessary research to find out has not yet been done.

Relationships, and our attitudes toward them, are strongly influenced by our past lives. After living many past lives, we will have experienced a variety of relationships, some good, some not so good, and we often expect or even create repetitions of those relationships in our present lives, as the people I have discussed above. This is complicated by the fact that we come into the world packed with individual traits of past lives: goals, hopes, plans, talents, experiences and expectations, traits that are strengthened or weakened by our upbringing and our family’s values. Nowhere is this truer than with relationships. It is important to “know thyself,” as Socrates said, and that includes knowing what expectations about relationships you have brought with you into this life. We can free ourselves of our unhappy relationships and build good ones, but only if we accept the unique individuality of each one of us.

Most mainstream theories of psychology hold that people are attracted to each other because of various resemblances to some other person, often a parent. This can be a positive or a negative resemblance. One can be attracted because of good qualities or not-so-good ones. Although these beliefs are not always supported by people’s actual choices if you look only at the present life, they do seem to be true when you examine their past lives. People do seem to choose relationships because of some similarity to a person they have known in a past life, sometimes even with the same person. So where relationships are concerned, mainstream psychology may have the right answers, but they need to be extended to include our past lives as well as our present ones.

As I said above, relationship issues are the most common problem people seek past-life therapy for. Issues that have to be worked out are not usually the results of good relationships in past lives, although they can be. But they are usually the result of relationships that were unhappy in some way. Perhaps a strict Victorian husband dominated his wife to the point of controlling her life and has now been reborn; she may choose to come back as his sibling, thinking she can dominate him now. Or a woman may have been a neglectful or cruel mother in a past life. She may deliberately choose to come back as the child of one of her children because she feels she needs to learn how to be submissive or, less happily, because she still feels the need to dominate that person who was her child.

As to whether people actually resolve these negative issues in the present life, the answer is, usually, no, not without help. If anything, negative patterns seem to get worse over the years in cases like this. Like good relationship connections, bad ones can also go rolling on for generation after generation. Some have been going on for centuries. In past-life therapy, people often become aware of these negative connections, and can finally let them go. This frees them from having to focus on the “payback” and lets them begin to act upon whatever good goals they brought with them, or find some new, better goals for themselves. No one is fated to continue repeating old destructive patterns over and over. But it may be necessary to recognize that we are doing just that before we can change and get out of any relationship traps we may have built for ourselves over our past lives.

Excerpt from Soul Echoes